YMMV / Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

• Catharsis Factor:
  • The "Nasty Spill" chaos chamber modifier makes enemies spawn elemental puddles when different types of health bars are depleted. These puddles can damage other enemies. This can result in a glorious chain reaction where you kill an enemy, another one walks into the puddle and dies, releasing another puddle, and so on until the whole chamber is cleared with minimal ammo spent. It's especially enjoyable in obelisk rooms, where they'll all spawn in the same small area, so you can just sit back and enjoy the carnage. Of course, this becomes less amusing if the end boss turns out to be one of the tougher ones, since this will likely wipe out all the small enemies you could have gotten a Death Save off of...
  • Those who dislike the aspect of Random Encounters as a whole will feel immense pleasure in simply punching any randomly spawned enemies in the overworld, Brick-style.
• Game-Breaker: Too many, has its own page.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • If you get a chaos chamber run with Zomboss as the end boss, then you can kill yourself after killing her to respawn her with no cost to your lives. With this, you can farm her for loot and crystals. Now patched.
  • Playing while not connected to the internet makes legendaries appear in vending machines. It also presently undoes the damage nerf to the Liquid Cooling pistol.
  • Randomly, the game will forget to apply any chaos level health boosts to enemies. So if you're suddenly tearing through everything, we're sorry to say it's not because of your build. However, this doesn't affect the boosts to gold, loot drops, and XP.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!:
  • The main game has a decent amount of content, though the level cap is only 40 compared to previous games' 50. When the DLC began to come out, fans were almost universally outraged that instead of being proper expansion packs with their own unique casts and storylines... every DLC pack just amounts to short dungeon runs that only take 10-20 minutes, essentially being reskinned Chaos Chamber runs. Tina, Valentine, and Frette aren't even involved, making the potential story hooks fall under They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot as well. Some fans have even accused Gearbox of selling Dummied Out content, as the first pack came out only a few weeks after launch and was being developed alongside the base game itself. What makes it even worse is that each "expansion" is priced at 10 dollars each, amounting to 40 dollars total, yet the content inside is barely enough to make up for it. This compares unfavorably to previous games with their full-fledged campaigns for reasonable prices.
  • Chaos Chambers in general is regarded as this. It boils down to randomly selected combat encounter rooms you've already seen before with random modifiers, and bosses you've already fought at the end. Aside from that, there's only one raid boss with a convoluted method of unlocking it, instead of being available right away after completing the main game. It's a similar situation to Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! with a similarly lackluster endgame.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • The Dragon Lord is the menacing yet oddly casual overlord terrorizing the Wonderlands. Originally Tina's own player character, the Dragon Lord has built up extreme resentment towards her for using him as the main villain for her campaigns, and resolves to take fate into his own hands. In a fine moment that not even Tina herself saw coming, the Dragon Lord waits for the Fatemaker to reclaim the Sword of Souls, only to steal it, chop off the head of his nemesis Queen Butt Stallion, and retreat to his lair, intending to use the sword to free himself from Tina's control, while doing what he can to halt the Fatemaker as they advance towards his lair. The Dragon Lord is ultimately defeated in the battle for the Wonderlands, turning over a new leaf when the Fatemaker spares him and guiding them through a series of challenges to help them grow stronger.
  • Zygaxis is a Daemon that, after the Fatemaker Kills his host in self defense, hires them to recover an incantation containing his true name so that he can find a new host. Locating a coven containing said name, he has the Fatemaker commit various acts of evil so that he can posses them and infiltrate the coven, reluctantly allowing them to commit more harmless crimes as they're just evil enough. Successfully infiltrating the coven, he has the Fatemaker kill the members and read his name, and then chooses a prisoner to posses as his new host, settling on a willing host. He then rewards the Fatemaker and leaves, remaining legitimately friendly towards them all throughout.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Having a piece of armor that augments a skill requires one to invest enough points in a skill tree to unlock the row that skill is on (although no points need to be invested in the skill itself, which is significant for skills without room for upgrades, eliminating any redundancy). Because the game has an Absurdly Low Level Cap compared to previous entries, skill points are far less plentiful and having to reap the benefits of gear that augment skills further in a given tree usually means investing heavily in that tree, forcing some tough investment decisions or having to change gameplay styles to benefit.
• Signature Scene: The "Vibe Check" scene, where Torgue conducts an intervention that ends with him summoning a series of ICBMs and blowing up the ocean, is universally hailed as the funniest and most memorable scene in the game.
• Spiritual Successor: The game is modelled after the Borderlands 2 DLC Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: In terms of the main story department, Wonderlands isn't considered to be on the levels of Borderlands 2 or The Pre-Sequel. But It is considered to be an improvement over it's predecessor due to it's more consistent plot, improved quality of comedy, fairer treatment of returning characters (such as Tina herself, Claptrap and Brick.) and a better received villain in the form of The Dragon Lord.
• That One Boss:
  • The Son of a Witch boss in Chaos Chambers is the boss that will likely block the Fatemaker's progress through the Chaos Trials, as he's required to progress past Chaos 6 and Chaos 13. The main issue is that he can summon a Spectral Aegis which replenishes his Ward and resummon it if destroyed, which due to the HP boost from the Chaos levels can cascade to a cycle where he can replenish more of his Ward than you can both deal damage to it and take down the Spectral Aegis timely. The boss is a check on whether your character build is fully optimized. And woe to you if you took the "nasty spill" modifier, since the skeletons he summons will walk right into the spilled ice puddles, destroying themselves and ensuring you have no way to get a Death Save if you didn't pick a companion class. Thankfully, the September 2022 patch reduced his damage, the potency of his shield recovery, and gave him a cooldown before he could summon his spectral aegis again.
  • Dry'l, especially in the Chaos Chambers, is a massive Damage-Sponge Boss with multiple phases. Even worse, like Son of the Witch, in his second phase he can replenish his Ward. Fortunately, his Crit spot is very large and easy to hit. The September 2022 patch reduced his shield recovery.
  • Pigwart. As a goblin mage, he's always zipping around, spewing constant elemental damage. He also has three health bars (armor, shield, and regular health) and briefly goes immune when you deplete one.
• That One Sidequest: One secondary objective in the Chaos Chambers is to kill enemies with a melee weapon. If your character and weapons make use of a lot of elemental damage and the rest of your arsenal isn't built to focus on melee damage, just forget about this challenge, as the elemental damage will almost certainly destroy enemies before your melee weapon of choice can, especially if said melee weapon itself can cause elemental damage.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: There have been some complaints about the skill trees for the Fatemaker that contrasts heavily from the previous Borderlands entries, mainly that the skill trees are singular their first class and subsequently binary in terms of choices instead of having the freedom of three trees per class, and that said skill trees don't do much to augment action skills if anything at all. Also they're currently stuck at level 40. It doesn't help that the Chaos levels limit has been increased post-launch, but player levels themselves still remain at level 40.

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